Baltimore's Chris Davis finds success, not so suddenly

Baltimore's Chris Davis leads the majors with 37 homers and advanced to the second round of Monday night's Home Run Derby.Associated Press

Sure, Chris Davis seems
sudden.

It's the kind of thing that
used to be nothing but fun, the surprises of summer, until baseball's home run
race turned into chemical warfare 15 or 20 years ago and dropped a cloud of
suspicion over anybody like Davis, who suddenly starts pounding baseballs over
the fence at a newly prolific rate.

Close to anonymous a year
ago, the Baltimore Oriole first baseman came to Citi Field for the All-Star
Game leading all players in the fan voting, invited by the Yankees' Robinson Cano
to take part in Monday night's Home Run Derby for captain Cano's American
League team.

Like the rest of the
eight-man field, the majors' home run leader – he tied Reggie Jackson's 1969 AL
record 37 homers at the All-Star break – ended up overshadowed by the
staggering power display of Oakland's Yoenis Cespedes.

After Tuesday night's
All-Star Game, Davis will get back to the business of chasing a playoff berth
and an MVP award – and maybe even make a run at 60-plus homers. If his
emergence as one of baseball's premier offensive powers seems sudden, know that
can work both ways.

At one point, Davis was on
the fast track, a fifth-round pick out of junior college in 2006, two years
after the Yankees took him in the 50th round out of high school,
three players before the draft ended. If you want to take a moment of silence
for all those high school hitters the Yanks have taken in the first round over
the last 15 years whom you've never heard from since, go right ahead.

The 2004 candidate, trivia
buffs, was high school catcher Jon Poterson, who hit .247 and .163 in a pair of
stints with the Staten Island Yanks and has been out of baseball since 2008.
Meanwhile the 50th rounder they didn't sign is doing a Roy Hobbs on
the league.

Davis was in the majors at 22,
racking up 17 homers and 23 doubles while hitting .285 in 80 games for the
Rangers. The next year, 2009, he had 21 in 113 games, but the average went
down, the strikeouts shot up – 150 – and the walk rate plummeted, taking Davis'
on-base percentage into the oblivion below .300.

Suddenly, Chris Davis
couldn't hit.

"I just kind of was like,
'What else am I gonna do? I used to be good at baseball.' I think it's
something that every player goes through to some extent whether they struggle
in the minor leagues or at the big-league level," said Davis. "I think there's
always kind of a maturing period where you figure out things about myself. It
just took me a little bit longer than most guys."

He spent chunks of four
straight seasons – 2008 through 2011 – in Triple-A. In the Pacific Coast
League, Davis was a monster, consistently hitting .325 and up, getting on base
40 percent of the time, hitting with power.

In the majors, it didn't
translate.

"I put these numbers up in
Triple-A," said Davis. "That was kind of the question: Was he going to be able
to do it at the big-league level? The thing about it was I just couldn't do it
consistently. I couldn't put the bat on the ball. I was striking out at an
astronomical rate."

And at the end of July in
2011, the Rangers gave up on Davis. They gave him to Baltimore for Koji Uehara
and cash. Uehara was a 36-year-old setup man who tended to throw between 45 and
65 innings a year. He was a pretty good one, too. Right now he's lights out for
the Red Sox, who picked him up as a free agent last year. But he's still a
late-30-something setup man.

This was something close to a
giveaway.

"I think there were times in
Texas when I just kind of had worn out my welcome," said Davis. "Knowing I was
getting another shot in Baltimore I was excited and ready to roll."

Davis said his confidence had
already begun to come back entering the 2011 season after a stint in winter
ball. He got another boost from Baltimore manager Buck Showalter, who said he
could count on 500 to 600 at-bats, a full season to show what he could do.

It wasn't going to be a free
ride past that though. Showalter needed to see something.

"It's not an open-ended
ticket," is what Davis remembers Showalter telling him.

By that standard, Davis was
probably running out of chances as he headed toward the end of August last
season. The Orioles were on their way to a charmed playoff berth, their first
since 1997, despite a middling offense. Davis was hitting .251 with an on-base
percentage stuck on .300 and 20 home runs.

But Davis closed with 13
homers in the last seven weeks – seven in the last eight games – jacking up his
batting average by 19 points and his on-base percentage by 26.

And now he's got 37 homers in
July after finishing with a career-high 33 last year – and just a career total
of 49 before that from 2008 to 2011.

"I've always had power," said
Davis. "I think it was more about consistently putting the bat on the ball and
not swinging at balls that were 14 feet out of the strike zone."

Fortunately for Davis, even
while the Biogenesis scandal stirs, any PED curiosity seems to mostly consist
of people asking him about being asked about it. When he was randomly queried
on Twitter about steroid use, Davis simply responded, "No."

"If
you'd have told me this was going on in spring training I was going to be
having this kind of year I wouldn't have even thought about it," said Davis.
"But it's here and it's now and it's something I'm obviously willing to talk
about. It doesn't bother me to talk about it. In a way I feel like it's almost
a backhanded compliment because it means I'm doing something right."